Platform & Infrastructure Engineer

Jonathon Wright

Building secure Kubernetes platforms, automated infrastructure fleets, and GPU-backed edge systems.

RHELKubernetesGitOpsAnsibleObservabilityEdge AI

~/jwright ▸6 single-node Talos clusters / 0 SSH daemons / every node rebuilt from committed config
cavealfredrobinkatewgirlelfastcnvidia computeintel computecore / services

01About

Reliability you can reason about.

I'm an infrastructure and platform engineer. I spend most of my time on the automation people usually leave in runbooks: store-edge Kubernetes running GPU-backed AI workloads, the GitOps pipelines that deploy them, and the network policy that keeps a fleet behaving the same way on every node. Before that I worked across larger enterprise estates - around a thousand VMs, multi-region migrations, segmented networks. I like infrastructure that can be rebuilt and explained from the repo. If a deployment still depends on someone remembering the right sequence of clicks, there's usually another piece worth automating.

Based
Sydney, Australia
Focus
Edge Kubernetes · GPU/AI · IaC & GitOps

# education

  • Advanced Diploma in IT Networking and Security
  • Diploma in IT Networking
  • Certificate IV in IT Networking

Download full CV (PDF)

  1. Infrastructure / DevOps Engineer

    Aug 2025 - Present

    Woolworths

    Core DevOps infrastructure engineer for store-edge solutions - turning high-level designs into single-touch deployments and CD pipelines.

    • Single-touch deployment of an edge AI solution running on Kubernetes at the store edge
    • GPU brought online as code - passthrough via ESXi, end-state manifests / Helm charts
    • Ansible playbook builds wired through a single source-of-truth pipeline with per-store vars
    • Removed manual practices across infra and ops - IaC throughout, spec-driven and documented as code
  2. Infrastructure Systems Engineer

    Aug 2022 - Aug 2025

    Virtus Health

    Global IT - optimisation, implementation and projects across an enterprise estate.

    • Managed ~1,000 VMs across a global VMware estate
    • Re-segmented flat sites into isolated VLAN ranges; SD-WAN and Aruba ClearPass onboarding
    • Migrated workloads to Azure (Blob, AVS); upgraded Palo Alto / FortiGate firewalls
    • Led a new major-site build - end-to-end services implementation
  3. Global IT Infrastructure Engineer

    Sep 2019 - Aug 2022

    Linde Asia Pacific

    Maintained and modernised global infrastructure to enterprise standards across the region.

    • Global VMware / Dell hosting; PowerShell automation of manual project tasks
    • Migrated company infrastructure off Google Cloud and Google Workspace to Microsoft: Linux domain controllers replaced with Windows Active Directory, users onto Microsoft 365 and Azure; AWS-hosted ERP access
    • ERP hardware refresh onto new mainframe plus DR solution - including daily COBOL green-screen operations; PBX → VoIP across AU/NZ

+ 2 earlier roles (ELGAS, Darktime) - see the CV.

02Capabilities

What I work with, grouped by what it's for.

FLAGSHIP

Edge AI & GPU

Serving vision and language models on real hardware at the edge.

  • Fail-closed computer vision on single-node OpenShift - probes that catch a silently dead model, not just a dead pod.
  • One GPU, two workloads - a single card time-sliced between LLM serving and video transcode instead of reserving separate hardware.
  • Vendor video-analytics stacks re-platformed as first-class Kubernetes workloads, not appliances.
  • Local models behind an OpenAI-compatible gateway - swap the backend, keep every client.
  • NVIDIA GPU Operator
  • GPU passthrough (ESXi, as code)
  • GPU readiness probing & watchdogs
  • Pod lifecycle management
  • YOLO / computer-vision inference
  • Local LLM serving (llama.cpp)
  • Edge Kubernetes

Platform & Virtualization

Kubernetes platforms designed to be reasoned about and recovered.

  • Kubernetes
  • OpenShift
  • Talos Linux
  • vSphere / VMware ESXi
  • Proxmox
  • containerd
  • Argo CD / GitOps
  • Helm & Kustomize

Automation & IaC

Single-touch deployments - removing the manual step, not documenting it.

  • Ansible / AWX
  • PowerShell (PowerCLI)
  • Python
  • Bash / Shell
  • Terraform
  • Image pre-pull & air-gapped registries (ACR / NVCR)
  • Secrets management

Networking & Security

Default-deny, segmentation, and a small attack surface.

  • SD-WAN
  • 802.1Q VLAN segmentation
  • ACLs / IPSec / RADIUS
  • Aruba ClearPass
  • Palo Alto / FortiGate
  • Firewall policy governance
  • RBAC · 2FA / SSO

Cloud & Identity

Hybrid estates across the major clouds, with identity done properly.

  • Azure
  • Entra ID
  • Intune
  • AWS
  • GCP
  • Microsoft 365
  • Azure Blob / S3

Observability & Ops

Knowing the system is healthy - and the GPUs with it.

  • Fleet metrics by remote-write - every cluster ships to one Prometheus, GPUs included (DCGM / Intel Xe).
  • Alerts that reach a phone and mean it - tuned until silence means healthy, not unmonitored.
  • A backup is a rumour until a restore drill proves it - drills are scheduled, not aspirational.
  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • DCGM Exporter
  • PRTG / LibreNMS
  • AWX job reporting
  • Veeam backup
  • ITIL processes

04Writing

Notes from the build.

Lessons from edge Kubernetes, GPUs, and running infrastructure like it matters - written up as I go.

  1. NVENC and CUDA are different silicon - so share the card

    An LLM and a video transcoder both want a GPU, and the obvious answer is 'buy two.' But a modern GPU isn't one resource - the video encoder is a separate chip from the compute cores. Here's how one RTX 5080 runs local inference and AV1 transcoding at the same time.

  2. The alert that could never fire

    A readiness alert that passed review was watching for a series the remote cluster's collector filters out before it ever leaves. An alert you never test is a belief, not a control.

  3. Every build succeeded. The dashboard said they all failed.

    A CI runner executed flawlessly for a month - images pushed, deploy branches landed - while reporting failure to the dashboard every time. A three-post release sat stranded for a fortnight because the status was believed over the artefacts.

Read the blog →

05Get in touch

Let's talk infrastructure.

Open to conversations about platform engineering, edge infrastructure, and GPU/AI systems. Based in Sydney, Australia - for a low-ms reply, ping me on LinkedIn or email; everything else is best-effort delivery.

[email protected]Download CV (PDF)